NVIDIA Kepler GK110 Performance Preview

OCAHOLIC.ch came up with some interesting review. Review of the card that doesn’t exist, well at least it’s not released yet. NVIDIA’s GK110 is the newest 7.1 billion transistor GPU, which will power upcoming Tesla K20 graphics card for High Performance Computing (HPC).

First rumors said that GK110 would be actually GeForce GPU, but NVIDIA decided to make some shifting to the naming and therefore move this GPU to other date. During GTC 2012 they presented this new chip as upcoming HPC unit for Tesla Series. But many of us still hope that this chip will eventually get into GeForce family.

OCAHOLIC team made a prediction, which is generally based on SMXs count and memory bandwidth impact to performance. Only the clocks (and actual memory capacity) were not revealed yet, so these are the rumored. Here’s how the ‘testing lineup’ looks:

Kepler GK110

GeForce GTX 680

GeForce GTX 670

Chip

GK110

GK104

GK104

Process

28 nm

28 nm

28 nm

Transistors

7.1 billion

3.54 billion

3.54 billion

GPU clock

1000 MHz

1000 MHz

1000 MHz

CUDA Cores

2880

1536

1344

Texture Units

240

128

112

ROPs

48

32

32

Memory

3072 MB GDDR5

2048 MB GDDR5

2048 MB GDDR5

Memory clock

1502 MHz (6’008 MHz)

1502 MHz (6’008 MHz)

1502 MHz (6’008 MHz)

Memory interface

348 Bit

256 Bit

256 Bit

Memory bandwidth

288384 MB/s

192400 MB/s

192400 MB/s

If you are interested in new technologies that are coming with new Tesla K20 (GK110) card then grab this whitepaper [PDF]. New GPU is compared to GeForce GTX 680 and GTX 670 with a similar core clock. Test rig was equipped with Intel i7-2600K processor and 16GB of DDR3 1600 MHz memory. Card were tested with the full-hd resolution, which is a standard setting for card with at least 2GB of memory. Results suggest that GK110 is slightly faster than GeForce GTX 680 in SLI configuration. I believe that NVIDIA will use this chip for GeForce 700 series, as it arrives this chip will be quite a mature GPU, so there shouldn’t be any problem with its production.

Here’s their conclusion:

The ”if rule”: So if the drivers perform like the 301.25 we used. If we didn’t do any mistakes in the calculation and the prediction. And if the scaling works well like we analyzed with the GK104 then this card is a monster in performance. We don’t know the price, power consumption and the heat dissipation but what we can tell, if our results are very accurate, is that this GK110 is powerful. It will be around 1.8 times faster than a GTX 680 in synthetic benchmarks and 1.6 faster in games. In fact it can be compared directly with the GTX 680 SLI as in average it performs around 3-5 % better.

We remind you that those aren’t the real results of the GK110 performance nor random numbers, it is a prediction based on a valable hypothesis!